It's been an interesting week for indie developers and their fans. Nintendo clarified their stance on letting indie developer's work on Wii U games and Microsoft reversed their policies concerning indie developers self-publishing on the upcoming Xbox One. In honor of that, we review the indie game policies of Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony.
Microsoft has been struggling to attract indie developers. Part of the reason: Microsoft is refusing to allow indie developers to self-publish their own games. However, now Kotaku is reporting that Microsoft will allow indie developers to self-publish, meaning indie developers will not have to pay large sums of money to third-party publishers to get their work on the Xbox One. As Microsoft states in their official announcement for the news:
"Our vision is that every person can be a creator. That every Xbox One can be used for development. That every game and experience can take advantage of all of the features of Xbox One and Xbox LIVE. This means self-publishing. This means Kinect, the cloud, achievements. This means great discoverability on Xbox LIVE. We'll have more details on the program and the timeline at gamescom in August."
Meanwhile, Nintendo has completely shut out indie developers from Japan from creating games for the Wii U. The development emerged in the forum on the Game Developers Conference 2013 website, which states that Nintendo is not accepting applications from developers in Japan. The Wii U is not known for having indie games on the system, and policies like this may be the reason.
Sony has done the most to attract indie developers to the PlayStation 4. They have stated repeatedly the company's desire to get indie developers onboard with the system, making it clear they can publish their own games for the next-gen system. The PS4 has been designed like a high-end PC for ease of use for all developers, and Sony's lead architect for the console believes that the system is poised to get the lion's share of future indie games onto the PlayStation Store. Certainly critical and commercial successes like Journey and The Unfinished Swan have helped Sony's reputation as the king of indie games for consoles.
While each of the big three has their own strategy for indie developers, it remains to be seen how much impact they will have. Gamers will just have to wait and see how much these little engines that could affect the video game landscape.